Over the years, we have seen technology progress vastly in a small amount of time. If we compare todays devices to those we used a century ago, we might surprise ourselves as to how much we have progressed in the last century compared to the amount of time humans have been wandering around the earth.

In the past few decades CGI has become extremely popular in movies, video games and simulators among others. The majority of us have seen a movie or played a video game that has human characters and as times have progressed the realism of those characters has increased.

Microsoft's Beijing research lab have now been able to take 3D modeling one step further and have managed to produce a near-perfect 3D render of a face. The technique uses 3D scanning, a motion capture system and their newly developed technique which figures out how many face scans are needed in order to create a perfect render. With this new technology it will help create renders faster and more accurately.

The team plan to present their findings at SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Vancouver, B.C.

Although this achievement may not seem like much on the face of it, it’s very likely that this technology will later be implemented into Kinect (if they have the technology, why not implement it?) which will ultimately make Kinect more powerful than it already is. More power and technology in the product should create more features and overall a nicer user experience. A nicer experience for its users means more sales of Kinect, which eventually means more money to be put into more research.

The news comes as yesterday Neowin reported that Microsoft was the eighty-sixth most innovative company in the world according to Forbes, losing to companies such as Starbucks, Nintendo and Adobe.